A Shadow All of Light (37 page)

I took the fellow to be in daily life a man of affairs, a broker of grains, perhaps, or a skilled keeper of accompts. He must make a singularly modest clown, and I wondered how many of the other Jesters so prominent in our public spaces led lives equally unnoteworthy.

Astolfo spoke to him. “Mutano is anxious about payment just now,” he said. “There is a lass with flaxen hair in Cobblers' Lane who is accomplished with the harp. She flatters him that he can sing.”

Mutano shook his head glumly. There were no secrets from Astolfo.

“I accept your word that he is trustworthy,” the Bennio said.

“I am warrant for him and for Falco.” Astolfo indicated me with a nod. “And, come to that, your commission seems none so difficult. We are to construct the ritual coffin of the traditional materials and to the traditional specifications and accompany it in the general procession to the Tumulus. There we are to aid in interring it in the Jester's Boneyard. You are to be chief Ministrant at the burial, seeing that the likeness of the Jester in its coffin is settled into the earth and heaped over with clay and sod.”

“Everything must be performed punctiliously,” the Bennio said. “It is extremely important that the rituals are carried out according to custom. If there is a misstep or a gesture out of order, the consequences are unforeseeable but destructive.”

“Why so?” Mutano asked. “Is it not so much mummery-flummery enacted to entertain crowds of gapers and japers? The Feast of the Jester is a time of confusion, of license and mockery, of swillage and careless tuppery. Why is this burial of an empty coffin so important?”

The Bennio looked at him with mild surprise. “But the coffin is not empty,” he said.

“I have heard,” I said, “that it contains only an effigy of the Jester, together with a specimen of the small stick-puppets called Dirty Benninos.”

“Those are included in the coffin,” he said. “I shall have them delivered to you. But the coffin also contains a shadow to be buried with the figures.”

“Whose shadow?” I asked.

His tone was resigned. “In this case, mine own.”

*   *   *

Astolfo explained.

We were occupying our accustomed seats in the small library, sipping at a voluptuous dark wine cool in an earthenware jug. A pleasing draught it was, but not strong enough to divert us from our thoughts.

“There is of course a Society of Jesters,” he said, “and they take it upon themselves to perpetuate the Feast and preserve the memory of their great original. He was the first, they say, to make his vocation as a clown an accepted profession. Some claim he was the first of all Jesters, but that notion beggars credence. It is written that his gibes and mimes and epigrams and satires served to restrain the province councilors and the upper ranks of the military from grasping overmuch power and from abusing what they had already obtained. He kept watch upon their plots and stratagems and underhand processes. He gained the eyes and ears and then the hearts o' th' people and persuaded them to look with skeptical gaze upon all the doings of the leaders. He was the watchdog and the tocsin that made the citizens alert to—”

Mutano interrupted. “All this I have heard since the time I was an urchin with mine own Dirty Bennino clutched to my chest. I sang the song that all did sing:

‘Crambo and crooked Bennio goes,

But what the Jester knows, he knows.'

And I would laugh the snarling laugh that followed the rhyme.”

He did so and I judged from his new-found voice that Mutano could fill the Jester role passably well.

“You remember clearly,” Astolfo said. “I suspect that Falco too could spell out a familiar Jester's rhyme or two. Yet perhaps, in the interest of mercy, he will forbear.”

I kept silent even though a couplet bubbled unwelcome into my brain:
This foolish world you hold so dear, Bennio bids to kiss his rear.
Then others crowded into my head, and I gazed out the open window into the late summer garden to drive them away. They were like those simple, repetitive tunes of childhood that burrow into the mind and buzz and chirp and will not silence.

“Still, it is all only ceremonious sham,” Mutano said.

“Sham, flummery, vanity—if so, that matters not. It is custom and, as the ancient Plinius Secundus hath written, custom rules all behavior. A sentiment the larger populace clings to is that if we fail to revere and celebrate our Jester, we shall become always more susceptible to the deceptions and treacheries of those who hold authority over us. It would be like losing a certain power of judgment that helps to make us wary as citizens. And that in turn would make the city more susceptible to foreign attack.”

“This description lays large responsibility upon a cap-and-bells, a curlicue spine, and some trite, scabrous rhymes,” I said.

Astolfo blinked at me and asked, “Is my description of the importance of Bennio inaccurate?”

I considered. “It is accurate in the main.”

“Then let us proceed, looking upon our task as our duty, as well as being to our profit. The Jester Society may gap its coffers for us, if we can fulfill its commission.”

“You have told this Bennio that the task seems none so difficult. He must have laid down further conditions or warned you of some hindrances,” I said.

“He and a few of his trusted colleagues believe that their Society is being undermined by foes of the Jesters or adulterated by the apostasy of some of its present members. He would enlist us, on behalf of his group of select associates, to discover who these impostors are and what their purposes might be. To be successful, we must do so before the ceremony at the Tumulus takes place. That is but a fairly short time from now.”

“Why must this time limit be in place?” I asked.

“The Bennio who is our client had been chosen by lot, as is the custom, to be the Ministrant at the burial ceremony. It is not known to the city at large that the shadow of the Ministrant is taken from him beforehand and laid in the coffin alongside the two other likenesses. It is the duty of the Ministrant to sacrifice his shadow for the general welfare.”

“He allows us scant time.”

“He has no say. The third-phase moon is at the zenith in twenty days.”

“Ah,” I said, recalling that a chief element of the Feast was that the face of the Jester figured itself in the crescent moon at that hour. The hooked nose, the low brow with its drooping, belled peak, the glaring eye, and the up-jut goatee that almost touched the nose—these features were most clearly visible during that point of the Feast. It was a simpleminded form of apotheosis. Young children marveled to see the Jester sailing the sky; their parents and the other adults chuckled at the image. The features of the moon's surface that furnished this portrait of the Jester were always present when the moon was visible and could be traced by anyone. But the crescent moon at its zenith forced the imagination to construct a mocking celestial countenance that smirked as it glowered down upon the follies of us miserable mortals.

Mutano gave a rude snort to signify his disbelief. Then he said, “I cannot conceive how the disruption of an empty ritual can cause great harm. Still less can I conceive why anyone should want to do so. What profit can there be in it?”

“That question our Jester could not answer,” Astolfo said. “He only had gained an apprehension that this disruption might be taking place. He had observed some peculiarities of behavior—some scraps of talk, some knowing glances. And lately, he said, there had been a large increase in the membership of the Society, though the number of the citizens of Tardocco has not increased.”

“What then is your surmise?” I asked.

“I can put no words to it. There are rumors abroad that the pirate Morbruzzo has designs upon the city, to bring his three-master against us, to invade and then to attack and plunder and raze the town.”

“These rumors are ever-present,” Mutano complained. “When barbers run dry of scandal, they open their tattle-pouches to produce the name of Morbruzzo.”

“There is talk also that the exiled husband of the Countess Trinia, now lurking in the island of Clamorgra, has gathered a force to bring against our province, as much for revenge as for plunder.”

“That rumor too has grown threadbare,” I said. “And dozens of others like these you can tally, but they remain baseless, insofar as we can know.”

He nodded. “'S truth. Yet prudence suggests that we be ware of these possibilities.”

“Even if one or t'other should prove more solid than vain, I do not understand how a misstep in the burial ritual could more endanger us,” Mutano said.

“Well,” Astolfo said, with a shade of impatience, “I shall admit I cannot see the consequence myself. We must question our Bennio more closely on the morrow.”

*   *   *

When he did appear shortly before the noon, our Jester was carrying a leather portmanteau of uncommon size and was accompanied by his dog. His name was Mars, we were informed, and certes no animal ever less deserved the name. He was small and white from muzzle to the stubby tail that he wagged continually. Even his spraggle whiskers gleamed steely, like the tines of a hayfork. But his eyes were largish black buttons that might have been cut from a basalt block and polished to a liquid sheen. He looked at the three of us as we stood out in the pebbled carriageway before the manse, turned as if to inquire of his master, and then, receiving a signal I could not perceive, scrambled over to sniff at our boots. Satisfied with a cursory investigation, he returned to his master's side and sat and regarded our faces each in turn.

“He seems an intelligent creature,” Mutano said, “though none so bellicose as the name you have given him.”

“He can defend himself well enough,” the Jester said, “but his best value is as a jongleur. He can dance and prance, leap and tumble with the best of them.” He cocked his hand leftward, lifted his thumb, and Mars leapt to the height of his shoulder and twisted twice in the air before finding the ground again.

“Well done,” Astolfo said. “Shall we proceed to the instruction for our commission?”

The Bennio stooped to open his leather bag and brought out a roll of paper. “Here are the dimensions for the coffin, written out and with sketches,” he said. “It would be better to look them over inside so that the breeze does not disorder the papers. And here is the mask I shall don before you cut away my shadow. I must be wholly in the character before it is taken from me. I shall bring the Jester effigy and the little Dirty Bennino when the coffin is ready.”

“Let us advance to this procedure at once,” Astolfo said. “The shadow separated will make measurement simpler and more accurate.” He led us to the plastered brick wall that enclosed the kitchen garden. A large oblong of porous linen was affixed upon the plaster with brass nails.

We stood our Bennio before the cloth, adjusting his stance and posture until we were satisfied that he was casting the best umbra of a Jester we could obtain. The sunlight was bright and unhindered and the shadow was sharply defined at every edge and contour. It was the very Idea of a Jester: The hunched back curved like the belly of a goblet, the hands were elongate at the sides of the round stomach, the legs stood apart, knobbly and crooked. The large mask he wore threw a shape demonically mirthful, with aggressive eyebrows, great hooked nose, upthrust goatee, and a wide, feral grin. Over this countenance the peaked cap drooped a bell low upon the forehead.

“Now then, Falco,” said Astolfo.

“Well, but let him speak as the Jester,” I said.

“To what purpose?”

“To try to gain some sense of the nature of his shadow,” I said, though my only true reason was curiosity as to the way this affable man might ply his role in public.

He spoke:

“Crambo and crooked Bennio goes,

But what the Jester knows, he knows;

And what he knows the Jester will tell,

To set you a-laughing or rend you to hell.”

Then he uttered the maniacal cackle that was the very soul of his sword-edge humor and even though I had expected to hear it, the hairs prickled at my neck. His voice was louder than in ordinary discourse and the timbre much changed. There was a metallic, harsh clatter at its center and a heavy breathiness around the syllables. I thought there must be an amount of space between mouth and mask, so that an indistinct echo was produced. Perhaps a metal contrivance had been inserted as a mouthpiece. His was an unsettling voice; I judged it might frighten children more than it would amuse them. Yet he would alter his performance to suit his audience of the hour, softening it for the very young.

I stooped and excised his shadow at the outer edge of his scallop-topped black shoes and Mutano and I rolled the cloth and laid it in the shade of the oak that grew by the garden gate.

While we were transporting the umbra, the little dog uttered a long and piteous howl. I would not have thought the small creature capable of such a houndlike cry. He stared at us with an angry accusatory gaze and I wondered if the minuscule warrior might rush to attack. A gesture from the Bennio quieted him, but he kept his black eyes fixed at me, whom he must have regarded as principal in the thievery.

“He does not like the new shadow—or, rather, the old one,” the Bennio said.

Upon the space where the linen had hung stood revealed the man's true and present umbra. Of medium height, it was as straight and unremarkable as the shadow of any man. Indeed, one might suggest it as a representation of the upright life, the
integer vitae
that the ancient poet spoke of. I said of it, “Here is the shade of as honest a man as you might meet on any summer's day.”

Mutano spoke the other thought. “This shape lacketh the savor of a true Jester. It is hard to picture so respectable a figure turning cartwheels, contorting into bow-knots, dancing fandangos with a dog, and spitting acrid rhymes.”